An ode to my mother's farm

On a frosty January morning, John Lewis-Stempel builds a ‘dry hedge’ in tribute to the old ways that once abounded on the Worcestershire farm where his mother grew up

- John Lewis-Stempel

I REMEMBER Woodston… If God has designed a ‘typical English setting’, it’s surely Woodston Farm in Worcestershire. The land to the front of the farm is flat, running down to the sparkling River Teme and beyond to woods; behind and to the sides, it’s gently hilly (300ft), suitable for slow, fat sheep. There are still some limes, or linden, on the rising land that gives the surrounding parish of Lindridge its name.

Once, Woodston boasted some of the finest hop yards in England, watered from the Teme. The hops have gone; the hop kilns remain, but are converted into apartments. Well, farmers were told to diversify. But half arable, half livestock, Woodston remains the quintessential English mixed farm. The farm of your memory, your imagination.

I think I was seven when I first went to Woodston; we, my mother and I, walked up the long farm drive, past the orchard, to look at the farmhouse. She was on a nostalgia trip. My mother grew up at Woodston, where my grandfather, Joe Amos, was the farm manager or bailiff.

I’m currently writing the biography of Woodston, this most English of farms, up to the 1940s, when living memory begins. My biography does not exactly lack ambition. It begins with ‘the void’. The ancients believed in four elements, those of Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and although we might sneer at their science, the physical early history of Woodston is exactly a story of these things. From the nothing of the void came, via the Big Bang of 13.5 billion years ago, the gaseous cloud (air), which reduced to a burning ball (fire), to something solid (earth). Order out of chaos. By 600 million years ago, there was terra firma in the place that one day would be called Woodston.